So this is part flier tip, part tech hack; but you can pay almost half as much for wireless access for your laptop when flying. The trick is that the in-flight internet companies (GoGo etc) have much cheaper pricing for smartphones as they do for laptops. As of posting this smartphones were $7.95, laptops were $14.95. So the trick? Buy the smartphone access from your phone and then just tether it to your laptop. Your laptop will access the internet through the smartphone’s connection, and you will have got it for the reduced price.
Now for those of you with iPhones that are not jail-broken this may not be possible, but for unrestricted Andriod phones it can do this out of the box. Just connect it to your computer via USB or bluetooth and enable tethering!
***UPDATE
A reader wrote in an even easier way to do this straight from your laptop. Simply install a browser plugin that enables changing the ‘User Agent’ of your browser. This allows your browser to spoof that it is a mobile browser. One such plugin for Firefox is ‘User Agent Switcher‘.